Explore Your Archive 2017: #lovearchives

What better way to complete the hashtag challenge with a post about how we #lovearchives!!!

Prior to #Explorearchives we sent an invitation to colleagues inviting them to select the collection they love the most (if they could narrow it down to one) and then share their reasons for their choice.

“Measured and drawn by Peter Blakesley in the 1960’s, a lecturer at the Leicester School of Architecture, they are a rare survival of historic building research at the school and must be the only archive items acquired by DMU from a hand-over in a graveyard – quite legally I may add. They have also most recently been used to help inform a digital reconstruction of Bradgate House for the Bradgate Park Trust. I think at a number of levels they represent that preservation of institutional memory which can so enrich a University and the community and region in which it exists.”

Chosen by Dr Kelley Wilder, Director, Photographic History Research Centre

“I love the first ever issue of Animated which is now in the DMU Archive and Special Collection. It’s important because this began in a very homespun way (as you can tell from the attached) in 1986 but has been in continuous production ever since and now has an international readership and distribution championing and promoting community and participatory dance. It also has connections with DMU and its predecessor Leicester Polytechnic as the polytechnic offered the Foundation for Community Dance a home in 1989 and the foundation is still based in Leicester with strong links to DMU.”